3. Appeal to your reader: offer persuasive, benefit-led responses and think about the customer – what’s important to them? What are they looking for in their supplier? Don’t simply provide a list of features – if you want to win tenders, take your responses one step further and state the benefits.

4. Have a model: build a library of standard PQQ and tender responses – save documents such as insurance certificates, policies and yearly accounts in one place that is easily accessible by others in the company.

5. Outdo yourself: don’t leave your tender until the last minute – make sure that you have dedicated ample time and resources to produce the best possible result. If you can’t submit your best effort for this bid, why you are submitting at all?

6. Be decisive: make a conscious decision to bid – if you are tendering ‘just because’, this is not the recipe for a winning bid.

7. Discriminate: can you deliver this tender? Do you want to win this bid? If you win, what will happen to your other contracts? Make sure you’re bidding for business you really want.

8. Understand the bid requirements – and adhere to them.

9. Know your audience: read the bid evaluation criteria – what’s most important to the customer?

10. Be proactive: engage with the customer – being invited to bid is a compliment, and likely to put your submission in a stronger position than a cold response.

In order to win bids and tenders, you need to know what business is out there. For everything from construction bids and security contracts to facilities management tender opportunities and contracts for legal services, a reliable and ongoing feed of contract notices is essential.

Many tender notices are published on Tenders Direct – and with Win That Bid, you can have a special discount, saving you £95 off your first year’s subscription. Just quote WTB710 when you call – this offer is available independently of any Win That Bid service.

If you already have a feed of tender opportunities and are finding bid management too time-consuming, we can provide you with a dedicated account manager to handle the flow of bids and tendering opportunities. They’ll judge what’s out there and will only alert you to the most suitable and desirable contracts for your business’ core capabilities.

Call us today to learn how we can help you to find the very best tenders.

Writing a bid means writing dozens of documents for a wide (and sometimes mysterious) audience. That means employing some basic writing techniques to get the best possible impact out of your proposal. There are some basic strategies for clear bid writing:

Be direct and concise.

Avoid block text. If it becomes unavoidable, break the page up with images, charts and text-box quotes.

Words like would, could, might and may reduce the sense of quiet assured confidence in your bid, creating doubt in the mind of the reader.

One idea per sentence. What you really should avoid when bid writing is giant run-on sentences full of commas and different notions, that confuse the reader and reduce the flow of the document to a thick viscous sludge that causes the client to struggle for breath like a beached whale, as demonstrated by this sentence. Aren’t you glad that’s over?

Research the client

When writing a bid be client focused and personalised. One company’s non-specific generic boilerplate reads much the same as another’s, and will likely bore the reader. More to the point, a cut and paste job will fail in one of the basic goals of the bid – to demonstrate that the bid writer has a clear understanding of the goals, issues and problems faced by the client.

Determine who the reader of the bid (and its separate sections) will be. Are they informed enough to understand the specifics of your solution or are they seeking to employ you to provide a service with which they are technically unfamiliar? You should also write with personality in mind, even if you know yourself to be writing a bid for a team to read. Pragmatic thinkers will be interested in results, and look for direct language, brevity and the strong use of graphics to quickly illustrate a point. Analytical thinkers will prefer a focus on detail and accurate facts, with charts and graphs.

In general, it is best to avoid lots of Technical Jargon in an Acronym Soup (TJAS), even if you are expecting an informed audience. Anything that slows down reader comprehension will hurt the bid. If the client is using different terminology to that commonly used in your organisation or even your industry, it will normally be best to use their wording.